Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#561

Post by bigdict » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #525

ericol wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon. I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.

Yes, this was just a standard follow-up [1] and we did the standard counter-follow-up, which is to merge the threads. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...

Hi dang, I'm wondering is there a list of HN phenomena that you've noticed over the years?

Examples would be:

1. follow-up submissions

2. an initial wave of critical comments followed by a wave of apologist comments

3. first page of comments occupied by a single top level comment with lots of descendants (you often post to draw attention to other pages of comments in these cases)

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#562

Post by Pxtl » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

1f60c wrote: post #531

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

> Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :) DHH (of RoR and Basecamp fame) has been beating the drum about this for a while now.

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Post by nutanc » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #549

pb7 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

One justification might be that it creates an environment where everyone but the ad provider loses. If, hypothetically, Google was more pervasive than it already is, and made their ads more intrusive until consumers overwhelmongly clicked the highest priced ad for a given keyword, and Exotel bought the Ozonetel keyword, Ozonetel would have no choice but to buy ads for its own name. They could also buy ads for the Exo…

This is exactly what happened and a bidding war started(long time back).

And then we decided to step back from the bidding war. One reason to do so was because we did not have VC funded money. If we had VC money, maybe we would have continued the bidding war. But glad that we could make the right choice.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#564

Post by pb7 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

aaronmdjones wrote: post #552

pb7 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pretty valuable service that connects you to the things you are looking for. Why do you feel entitled to get this for free?

What? I didn't ask for anything for free. I'm just telling you what happens. Normal people don't remember domain names. I'd hazard a guess that half of them don't even know what those are. If they want to get anywhere , they put it into a search engine, even if it's something ridiculously common like Wikipedia.

That’s fine. But if you want to use a service, you have to agree to the service’s terms. That includes ads that appear before results and competitors bidding on ads for any search terms. That’s just how it works in a rational world. It doesn’t really matter the reason you had to use the service. Otherwise, why is Grammarly a billion dollar company? People are bad at grammar, let them live! And use the service for free, according to your logic.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#565

Post by johnrgrace » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

schappim wrote: post #250

johnrgrace wrote: post #187

I work at a fortune 50 company, a top 10 advertizer. We have a universal holdout poplation that NEVER recieves any directed/targeted marketing that serves as a control group for many marketing programs. Further in more mass areas there are direct A/B tests that go on. There is a very strong awareness of campaigns that are measurable with ROI's and other programs that are general branding that you can see the impacts…

Your Fortune 50 company owns a heap of brands (at least 16+ active) that span multiple demographics, geographies and maybe more importantly self-identities. Does the "universal holdout population" span across all the brands, or do you have a "universal holdout population" for each brand?

There is the core product, accessories, repair parts, digital services. Each area has it's own holdout because the sales process and channel are different. Channel partners also run their own advertizing which gets looked at.

For example: The digital services are an ingredient brand and can only really be sold to core product owners so they'll have a differnt holdout as their target population is different. Also that area has a short measurable path and thus different metrics and measurements.

There are some B2B areas that may not have holdouts, they functionally don't do any targeted marketing.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#566

Post by bdefore » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

efreak wrote: post #556

nutanc wrote: post #522

We did a similar kind of experiment some time back and found both FB ads and Google ads were doing jack shit for us. Google was better. FB ads were absolutely useless. So we stopped our ad spend. We observed no change in our customer acquisition. Another way these ad engines extract money out of you is by allowing competitors to bid for your brand name keyword. Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six…

Tip: URL suggestions are rarely advertising, and pop up faster than the results page does. Check the suggestions before searching.

Too much to hope for: a Chromium fork to have the search hint dropdown provide suggestions + Duck Duck Go results. And maybe block the enter key unless a resolvable address had been entered to prevent inadvertent Google searches.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

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Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #537

nutanc wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

[deleted]

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#568

Post by abhgh » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #197

Nextgrid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is willing to run the experiments necessary The people that would have the power to run this experiment have their entire careers depending on things staying as-is. Running the experiment carries a significant risk of exposing that the advertising operations they're responsible for provide much less ROI than they pretend it does. The unwillingness of anyone to run such an experiment is already an answer. Why…

Uber was just incredibly incompetent to not audit their ad spend at all. I worked at an ad company. It was an absolutely standard metric to eg geo-fence ads out of a state or two for 3 months to demonstrate the impact of ads. This isn't easily externally visible, but tests like this are standard practice. Particularly in the app install space, which is sketchy as hell once you stop buying from the top handful of vend…

I partly work in this space, and I can confirm that geo-fencing over a time period is the probably the most transparent and convincing (to the client) way to do this. Essentially you mark out local regions (as small as zip codes or as large as states, or something else in this spectrum), and ensure that your advertisements only show within certain "fences". And then you compare old and new numbers within those fences.

The technical aspect aside, there are a lot of "soft" factors that help: regular communication of easily consumable numbers/graphs/metrics to the client, calling out inconsistencies, etc. In other words, this is far from a fire-and-forget exercise; this can be an intense monitoring and client-engagement exercise.

The regular client engagement sometimes helps you in pinpointing cause-effect in the observations too. For ex company X might decide to advertise less of product Y in a certain state Z because of new laws there. But the team you're interacting with might not be aware of this change, or might not be cognizant of its potential impact on an advt. campaign. Regular dialogue helps here since you might observe a change in sales trends, and bring it up in a meeting - and the client team might be able to then rationalize the change. This is healthy for both parties.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#569

Post by xpe » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #202

xpe wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, care to define your terms? Second, inefficient relative to what? Third, so far, what you've written here looks like a rant, not a predictive theory nor a powerful explanatory theory. Would you like to quantify your claim? Or at least make it more precise? As it is, I don't think it advances your argument. I'm interested in strong logic, data, explanations, and persuasion. I see none yet.

> Second, inefficient relative to what? The sad thing is it's not inefficiency relative comparable things. But anyone that has worked at these places or sold B2B to them just knows it on intuitive level that they are garbage, and need a heavy sedative to think there are no alternative. > not a predictive theory nor a powerful explanatory theory It's not. It's about letting go of some efficient market ideal and then f…

Thanks for elaborating. I don't think I disagree with many or most of the points you've made.

It might be interesting to define a systematic and testable definition of organizational efficiency relative to an ideal market. Just like combustion engines can be compared to their theoretical maximum efficiency, it would be interesting to compare a particular organization against its maximum potential.

Here is another angle on the topic of relative efficiency. Consider a particular organization. Coca Cola will do as an example. Given its environment (financial incentives, regulations, cultural norms, etc), are we surprised by its behavior? This raises the question of how much an organization's particulars (e.g. leadership, history) affect its efficiency.

I suppose I take a systems view of it. Many deplorable businesses survive in niches. But can you "blame" them? It is a matter of perspective: organizations, like life, adapt to their environment and modify it to their liking. Such organizations can stretch the environment to or past its breaking point for a relative long period of time before having to deal with the downstream consequences.

Re: Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

#570

Post by nutanc » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #551

nutanc wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone. "If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly t…

>The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV. >More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be?…

"if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?"

Apple is a common noun in the English language. So I would assume the first result to be Wikipedia or some site which gives the best details about apples. The second result could be Apple.com or whoever has applied for the keyword.